Study 1 investigated individual differences in spatial cognition amongst visually impaired students and sighted controls, as well as the extent to which visual status contributes to these individual differences. Fifty-eight visually impaired and 255 sighted university students evaluated their sense of direction via self-ratings. Visual impairment contributed to the factors associated with the use and understanding of maps, confirming that maps are generally unfamiliar to visually impaired people. The relationship between psychological stress associated with mobility and individual differences in sense of direction was investigated in Study 2. A stress checklist was administered to the 51 visually impaired students who participated in Study 1. Psychological stress level was related to understanding and use of maps, as well as orientation and renewal, that is, course correction after being got lost. Central visual field deficits were associated with greater mobility-related stress levels than peripheral visual field deficits.

The present study analyzed demographic and psychological factors that affect adult men's decisions to solicit a prostitute. We administered a questionnaire to 1 400 randomly sampled men aged 20 to 59, who live in the Tokyo metropolitan area (obtaining 664 valid responses). The results revealed that 14.6 percent of respondents have had the experience of being a client in prostitution at some point over the past four to five years. Men in their 50s, who spent their adolescence before the enforcement of anti-prostitution laws, had high prostitution acceptability. Those in their 20s and 30s, who spent their adolescence in the 1990s when “Enjyo-Kousai” (Japanese amateur prostitution)gained topicality, also showed high rates. These findings are considered to be birth cohort effects. In addition, those men who reported grater sexual drive and desire for intimate contact with others, as well as those who reported fewer attitudes of gender egalitarianism, had higher rates of prostitution solicitation. Finally, those men who reported less emotional family bonds also showed higher rates.

This study tested Agnew's (1992) general strain theory (GST) of delinquency and crime. GST predicts that strain has an increasing effect on delinquency, and that the effect of strain is conditional upon several variables, including delinquent peers. I analyzed longitudinal data of 87 Japanese college students' deviant behavior in a classroom with a one-week interval, using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and applying an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate missing values. I found a significant main effect of strain and a significant interaction between strain and delinquent peers, after controlling for variables such as gender, school year, the number of previous delinquencies, and other variables based on social control and differential association theories. These results are consistent with GST. However, I also found that delinquent peers had a decreased effect for unstrained students, and an increasing one for strained students. The implications of the results are discussed.

A field experiment was conducted to examine the effects of food and the “door-in-the-face technique” on compliance with a request that one participate in a psychological experiment. It was predicted that positive affect was induced in participants who did eat, while those who did not eat were deemed to have neutral affect. Participants then received a rejection-then-moderation procedure (i.e., the door-in-the-face technique) or not, in that half of the participants were induced to refuse a large initial request and then asked a small request, while the other half were asked only a small request. Participants who experienced either a positive event (eating) or a negative event (normative pressure for reciprocation of concession) were more likely to agree to participate in an experiment than did neutral affect controls, likely because of mood maintenance or mood repair. However, people who were subjected to both events helped no more than did controls. This latter result suggests that positive affect may function as a resource that provides a psychological buffer against negative affect. Participants who complied in the no-food/no-technique and food/technique conditions rationalized their own behavior (i. e., engaged in dissonance reduction). The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed, with respect to the manipulation and measurement of affect.

We investigated how people develop preferences for stimuli, as a function of different levels of response cost. In Experiment 1, participants learned to discriminate between stimuli that followed high-cost versus low-cost responses. Contrary to previous studies of pigeons, participants chose the stimulus that appeared after a single response. In Experiment 2, three kinds of discriminations (low-cost, high-cost, and delay conditions) followed a single response, 20 responses or a five-s delay period, in order to examine how temporal factors affect choice. Participants with fast reaction times chose the stimuli in the low-cost condition, over those in the high-cost and delay conditions. Participants with slow reaction times chose the stimuli in the high-cost condition over those in the low-cost condition. These results suggest that temporal factors may become critical when choosing a stimulus that is presented after the response. These results are discussed in terms of the difference between expected and actual values of the reward, which determined stimulus preference either by virtue of contrast or assimilation.

The author developed a Japanese version of the Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale (CSWS) that was originally developed in the United States (Crocker, Luhtanen, Cooper, & Bouvrette, 2003). The Japanese version of the scale measures seven contingencies of self-esteem: Defeating others in competition, appearance, relationship harmony, other's approval, academic competence, virtue, and support of family and friends. Scores on the scale had systematic relationships with related variables, and the scale therefore exhibited satisfactory levels of construct validity: Relationship harmony, other's approval, and support of family and friends were positively correlated with sympathy and interdependence, whereas competitiveness was negatively correlated with sympathy. Moreover, competitiveness and academic achievement contingencies predicted competitive motivation, whereas the support of family and friends contingency predicted self-sufficient motivation. The scale has adequate test-retest reliability and a seven-factor structural model was confirmed. The implications for self-esteem and interpersonal relationships in Japanese culture are discussed.

This study investigated the relationship between assumed-competence (based on undervaluing others in general belief) and learning-related communication. Two-hundred-seventy-one high school students completed a questionnaire measured assumed-competence, engagement in study-related conversations with friends (planned courses after high school, students' own achievements in learning, school subjects they like and dislike, anxiety about failure, criticism of others), help-seeking behavior directed towards teachers and friends, and help-giving to friends. Students who had high assumed-competence tended to brag about their own achievements, criticize their teachers' methods, and talk negatively about their friends' academic failures. Furthermore, assumed-competence correlated positively with avoidance of help-seeking from friends, avoidance of help-giving to friends, and giving away answers on assignments. These types of help-seeking and help-giving behaviors are apparently not connected with learning, given that people with high assumed-competence tended not to seek help from friends or help friends in appropriate ways. The present results indicate that assumed-competence could be an obstruction to the formation of good relationships with others.

A number of different methods for assessing relational aggression have been utilized in previous research. It has been suggested that scores on self-report measures of relational aggression especially in children and adolescents are not associated with scores on other types of measures, suggesting that peer-report measures are more accurate. Nevertheless, few prior studies have directly compared self-and peer-reports. The purpose of the current study was to investigate which type of report is superior. We first developed a new questionnaire to measure relational aggression by self and peers. Elementary school children (grades fourth to sixth; n=243) completed this questionnaire. In addition, their teachers nominated high and low relational-aggressive children in their classes. The two reports were different in terms of correlational analyses, but were almost the same with regards to group-related analyses using analyses of variance (ANOVAs). Moreover, girls' peer-reports were more similar to the teacher nominations than they were to their self-reports, and boys also showed a similar trend. We discuss how self- and peer-reports should be used in future studies.

The present study investigated the relationship between children's overly positive self-perceptions of their own social competence and mental health. Elementary school students (grades fourth to sixth, n=331) and their homeroom teachers (n=9) participated in the study. The positive illusion was measured by the difference between the self-rating and the other (homeroom teachers) -rating. And, the index of mental health was administered in both self-rating and other (homeroom teachers and same-sex classmates) -rating forms. Positive illusions about children's social competence were positively related to self-ratings of mental health. However, the present study also found detrimental effects of such positive illusions. Children with excessively positive views of their social competence were viewed by teachers and same-sex classmates as significantly more aggressive than those children who showed more evidence of self-devaluation. In addition, children with overly positive self-perceptions were not as accepted by same-sex classmates.